Thursday, March 27, 2014

Five Observations About the New 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Trailer

As was probably the case with many of you today, my social media feeds were inundated with commentary on the newly released trailer for the Michael Bay-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film ... most of which has skewed toward the "Michael Bay ruins everything" side of things. To be fair, a lot of those gripes are justified, as just about everything about the trailer — including Megan Fox as the film's resident pouty-lipped and flabbergasted female — leads me to believe that this will be closer to Transformers than The Avengers in terms of faithful cinematic adaptations.

That being said, it's not all bad, necessarily. Here are five things I took away from my first few viewings of the trailer.

The turtles themselves are huge, which complicates the whole "ninja" part of the franchise. There's no way these massive, muscled reptiles are sneaking anywhere covertly when they're making loud thud noises whenever they jump around. In WWE parlance, they should probably be more Daniel Bryan than Brock Lesnar.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with the actual animation of the turtles themselves, but I think giving the guys lips and noses injects the film with a whole lot of unnecessary nightmare fuel. I'd rather the special effects team created digital versions of the Jim Henson-designed suits worn for the 1990 film, or at least used those as a template.

Although it's popular to bash Megan Fox on the internet these days, there's nothing overwhelmingly egregious about her performance as April O'Neil in this trailer. That hasn't stopped people from tweeting their outrage about her, but I guess haters gonna hate.

Shredder should technically be played by a Japanese actor if we're going to adhere to the original comics and cartoon series, but I'm genuinely curious to see what William Fichtner does with the role. Also, based on what we've seen in the trailer, filmmakers nailed the Shredder suit.

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About the Author

I'm a writer who openly admits that he enjoys the clicking of his own keyboard. On this blog you'll find pseudo-coherent ramblings about comic books, movies, video games, action figures and other frivolous things we all take way too seriously. Also, coffee.